Improved retinal vessel segmentation using the enhanced pre-processing method for high resolution fundus images

Background: By diagnosing using fundus images, ophthalmologists can possibly detect symptoms of retinal diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration, and retinal detachment. A number of studies have also found some links between fundus image analysis data and other underlying systemic diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, including hypertension and kidney dysfunction. Now that imaging technology is advancing further, more fundus cameras are currently equipped with the capability to produce high resolution fundus images. One of the public databases for high-resolution fundus images called High-Resolution Fundus (HRF) is consistently used for validating vessel segmentation algorithms. However, it is noticed that the segmentation outputs from the HRF database normally include noisy pixels near the upper and lower edges of the image. In this study, we propose an enhanced method of pre-processing the images so that these noisy pixels can be eliminated, and thus the overall segmentation performance can be increased. Without eliminating the noisy pixels, the visual segmentation output shows a large number of false positive pixels near the top and bottom edges. Methods: The proposed method involves adding additional padding to the image before the segmentation procedure is applied. In this study, the Bar-Combination Of Shifted FIlter REsponses (B-COSFIRE) filter is used for retinal vessel segmentation. Results: Qualitative assessment of the segmentation results when using the proposed method showed improvement in terms of noisy pixel removal from near the edges. Quantitatively, the additional padding step improves all considered metrics for vessel segmentation, namely Sensitivity (73.76%), Specificity (97.53%), and Matthew’s Correlation Coefficient (MCC) value (71.57%) for the HRF database. Conclusions: Findings from this study indicate improvement in the overall segmentation performance when using the proposed double-padding method of pre-processing the fundus image prior to segmentation. In the future, more databases with various resolutions and modalities can be included for further validation.